The Dirk Diggler Story is a 1988 mockumentary short film written and directed by Paul Thomas Anderson. It follows the rise and fall of Dirk Diggler, a well-endowed male porn star. The character was modeled on American porn actor John Holmes. The film was later expanded into Anderson’s successful 1997 breakout film Boogie Nights.

Dirk Diggler (Michael Stein) was born as Steven Samuel Adams on April 15, 1961 outside of Saint Paul, Minnesota. His parents are a construction worker and a boutique shop owner who attend church every Sunday and believe in God. Looking for a career as a male model, Diggler drops out of school at age 16 and leaves home. Jack Horner (Robert Ridgely) discovers Diggler at a falafel stand. Diggler meets his friend, Reed Rothchild (Eddie Delcore), through Horner in 1979, while working on a film.

Horner slowly introduces Diggler to the business until Diggler became noticeable within the industry. Diggler becomes a prominent model and begins appearing in pornographic films. Diggler has critical and box office hits which leads him to stardom. The hits and publicity lead to fame and money, which lead Diggler to the world of drugs. With the amount of money Diggler is making he is able to support both his and Rothchild’s addictions. The drugs eventually cause a breakup between Diggler and Horner, since Diggler is having issues with his performance on set.

After the breakup Diggler tries to make a film himself, but it is never completed. He then attempts a music career, which is successful but leads him deeper into drugs because of the amount of money he is making. He then stars in a TV show, which is a failure both critically and commercially. Having failed and with no work, Diggler returns to the porn industry, taking roles in low-budget homosexual films to help support his habit. On July 17, 1981, during a film shoot, Diggler dies of a drug overdose.

The film ends with a quote from Diggler: “All I ever wanted was a cool ’78 ‘Vette and a house in the country.”

The film was Anderson’s first real production having experimented with what he called “standard fare”. Anderson conceived the film when he was 17 years old and a senior at Montclair College Preparatory School. Anderson called his friend Michael Stein, telling him to come over for a production meeting, and told Stein his idea: “John Holmes”. Stein loved the idea and was cast to play the role of Dirk Diggler; he selected his own wardrobe. Stein showed Anderson some video of his friend Eddie Dalcour, who was a professional body builder, which Anderson loved and cast him in the role of Reed Rothchild. Anderson’s father, Ernie Anderson, narrated the film and Robert Ridgely, a friend of Anderson’s father, played the role of Jack Horner

The film was shot in 1987 using a video camera and steadicam provided by Anderson’s father. Some scenes were shot at a motel. Anderson raised money for the film by cleaning cages in a pet store. Being influenced by This is Spinal Tap at the time, he decided to do a mockumentary and used the John Holmes documentary, Exhausted, as a model for the film, even taking some dialogue almost word-for-word. Anderson worked from a shot list and wanted the actors to be serious since the characters took their work seriously. Anderson edited the film using two VCRs. According to Anderson, the film drew admiring laughs when it was was shown at a University of Southern California film festival.

The Dirk Diggler Story was expanded into Anderson’s 1997 breakout film Boogie Nights with a number of scenes appearing almost verbatim in both films. Two actors had roles in both films; in Boogie Nights, Robert Ridgely played The Colonel, a pornography financier, and Michael Stein had a cameo appearance as a stereo store customer. The main differences between The Dirk Diggler Story and Boogie Nights are the mockumentary versus narratives styles in the former and latter films, respectively; Diggler’s stint in gay porn in the first film versus his prostitution in the second; and Diggler’s dying from an overdose in the first film versus his happy return to his former roles and lifestyle in the second.

.

.

The 5,000-year-old iron bead might not look like much, but it hides a spectacular past: researchers have found that an ancient Egyptian trinket is made from a meteorite. The result, published on 20 May in Meteoritics & Planetary Science1, explains how ancient Egyptians obtained iron millennia before the earliest evidence of iron smelting in the region, solving an enduring mystery. It also hints that they regarded meteorites highly as they began to develop their religion. “The sky was very important to the ancient Egyptians,” says Joyce Tyldesley, an Egyptologist at the University of Manchester, UK, and a co-author of the paper. “Something that falls from the sky is going to be considered as a gift from the gods.”

.

.

According to one estimate, there are nearly 25 million porn sites worldwide and they make up 12 percent of all websites. Sebastian Anthony, writing for ExtremeTech, reports that Xvideos is the biggest porn site on the web, receiving 4.4 billion page views and 350 million unique visits per month. He claims porn accounts for 30 percent of all web traffic. Based on Google data, the other four of the top five porn sites, and their monthly page views (pvs) are: PornHub, 2.5 billion pvs; YouPorn, 2.1 billion pvs; Tube8, 970 million pvs; and LiveJasmin, 710 million pvs. In comparison, Wikipedia gets about 8 billion pvs.

.

.

A former Microsoft executive plans to create the first U.S. national marijuana brand, with cannabis he hopes to eventually import legally from Mexico, and said he was kicking off his business by acquiring medical pot dispensaries in three U.S. states. Jamen Shively, a former Microsoft corporate strategy manager, said he envisions his Seattle-based enterprise becoming the leader in both recreational and medical cannabis – much like Starbucks is the dominant name in coffee, he said.

.

.

Parents of a 15-year-old Chinese tourist have apologized after the teenager defaced a stone sculpture in an ancient Egyptian temple with graffiti. The act drew ire in both Egypt and China — generating a massive online backlash amongst China’s unforgiving netizens. The vandal carved ‘Ding Jinhao was here’ in Chinese in the 3,500 year old Luxor Temple.

.

.

If you thought JCPenney was having problems at the top — or if pressure cookers were posing problems for the tea-kettle industry — look no further than 405 freeway near Culver City in Southern California, where an innocent stainless steel pot is drawing comparisons to perhaps the least innocent person of all time, spigot salute and all. Enter your own “calling the kettle Fuhrer” reference here.

.

.

First Human-Engineered ‘Meat Burger’ To Be Consumed In London

Starting with a very particular cell extracted from dead cows necks at a local slaughterhouse, a select team of scientists are now close to serving up the world’s first human-engineered, cultured meat burger. That’s right. A whopping 5 ounce burger will be freshly made from lab grown bits of cultured meat and muscle tissue. The burger, the first of its kind, will be served to curious diner’s somewhere in London in the coming weeks.

.

.

The best time to have a beer (or two) would be when you’re searching for an initial idea. Because alcohol helps decrease your working memory (making you feel relaxed and less worried about what’s going on around you), you’ll have more brain power dedicated to making deeper connections. Neuroscientists have studied the “eureka moment” and found that in order to produce moments of insight, you need to feel relaxed so front brain thinking (obvious connections) can move to the back of the brain (where unique, lateral connections are made) and activate the anterior superior temporal gyrus, a small spot above your right ear responsible for moments of insight: Researchers found that about 5 seconds before you have a ‘eureka moment’ there is a large increase in alpha waves that activates the anterior superior temporal gyrus. These alpha waves are associated with relaxation, which explains why you often get ideas while you’re going for a walk, in the shower, or on the toilet.

.

.

The drones, which fly at an altitude of 150 yards, will be used at graffiti ‘hotspots’ such as the big German cities of Berlin, Leipzig, Cologne and Hamburg, a spokesman for Deutsche Bahn confirmed. The use of drones against vandals is the latest indication of the growing civilian market for unmanned aerial reconnaissance. Over 400 new drone systems are being developed by firms based in Europe, according to an EU report published last September. The drones used by Deutsche Bahn cost 60,000 euros each and are manufactured by German firm Microdrones, which also markets the machines for landscape photography, analysing traffic accidents and monitoring crops.

.

.

After tobacco was introduced to Spain from the New World in the 1500s, a tobacco trade developed in Europe in the 1600s. The aristocrats smoked Tommy Chong-size cigars, rolled in palm and tobacco leaves. When they were done smoking these enormous stogies, they would toss the butts on the ground, where peasants would pick them up, take them apart, and reroll what was left in small scraps of newspaper. “There was probably green smoke and sparks coming off of them,” Kesselman says of these early rolling papers. “It wouldn’t have been like they were smoking a new New York Times. They were smoking paper that had lead and cadmium and God only knows what in that ink, which would have been running all over their hands.”

.

.

Much of Manhattan is a secret city, and few secrets are better than this: Below venerable dive Max Fish, behind grated steel doors that often vibrate with noise, is an old brick-walled basement room, pipes snaking overhead, a sweet smell of subterranean sweat mixed with old beer and cigarettes hanging in the air. Contained within: musical detritus built up over a generation—assorted amps, drum kits, microphone cables, and one stand-alone toilet shrouded by a Mickey Mouse bedsheet. This is the last great music rehearsal space on the Lower East Side. It will soon cease to exist.

.

.

A BLOG ABOUT TRYING TO FIND AFFORDABLE HOUSING IN NEW YORK CITY

.

.

To re-connect young people with the teachings of the Catholic church, we developed ‘Soul OS’, a new operating system that encourages people to ‘upgrade their souls’ with Pope John Paul II’s inspirational quotes.

.

.

There’s no known scientific reason why a wireless signal might cause physical harm. And studies have found that even people who claim to be sensitive to electromagnetic fields can’t actually sense them. Their symptoms are more likely due to nocebo, the evil twin of the placebo effect. The power of our expectation can cause real physical illness. In clinical drug trials, for example, subjects who take sugar pills report side effects ranging from an upset stomach to sexual dysfunction.

.

.

“A guy tapped on my shoulder. ‘You wanna do bootleg record covers?’ ‘Sure!’ ‘Selma and Las Palmas, this Friday night, eight o’clock. Be there.’ He paused. ‘Alone.’ I agreed. “The intersection of Selma and Las Palmas at that time was one of the seedier Hollywood neighborhoods. Promptly at eight an old black 40’s coupe with smoked windows pulled up to the corner and stopped. The passenger window opened a crack. A paper sheet came out of it. I took the sheet and read it. It said ‘Winter Tour’ and had a list of Rolling Stones songs. A voice inside the car said, ‘Next Friday, same time.’ The window rolled up. Then the window rolled back down a tiny bit. ‘Alone.’

.

.

Nature takes the long view, mankind the short. Nature picks diversity; we pick standardization. We are homogenizing our crops and homogenizing our people. And Big Pharma seems intent on pursuing a parallel attempt to create its own brand of human monoculture.

.

.

This health directive needs to be revised. If we want to get maximum health benefits from fruits and vegetables, we must choose the right varieties. Studies published within the past 15 years show that much of our produce is relatively low in phytonutrients, which are the compounds with the potential to reduce the risk of four of our modern scourges: cancer, cardiovascular disease, diabetes and dementia. The loss of these beneficial nutrients did not begin 50 or 100 years ago, as many assume. Unwittingly, we have been stripping phytonutrients from our diet since we stopped foraging for wild plants some 10,000 years ago and became farmers.

.

.

“In 1911, acting on authority vested by the recently enacted Food and Drug Act, agents in the United States seized quantities of Coca-Cola syrup because they considered the caffeine content to be a significant threat to public health,” he wrote. “Following lengthy legal proceedings, Coca-Cola agreed to decrease the caffeine content of the drink, and further legal action ceased.” “Armed with improved knowledge of caffeine toxicity and faced with extensive evidence of substantial harm to public health, today’s authorities appear more perplexed and less decisive than their counterparts of more than a century earlier,” James continued. “In light of current international befuddlement and inaction, legislators, policy makers, and regulators of today confront a stark question — how many caffeine-related fatalities and near-misses must there be before we regulate?”

.

.

An Australian mining services company has fired up to 15 workers who performed an underground version of the Harlem Shake and posted it online, in a second incident of the Internet dance craze sparking safety concerns.

.

.

Ronald Carver, author of the 1990 book The Causes of High and Low Reading Achievement, is one researcher who has done extensive testing of readers and reading speed, and thoroughly examined the various speed reading techniques and the actual improvement likely to be gained. One notable test he did pitted four groups of the fastest readers he could find against each other. The groups consisted of champion speed readers, fast college readers, successful professionals whose jobs required a lot of reading, and students who had scored highest on speed reading tests. Carver found that of his superstars, none could read faster than 600 words per minute with more than 75% retention of information.

.

.

Precisely how did the sugar industry engineer its turnaround? The answer is found in more than 1,500 pages of internal memos, letters, and company board reports we discovered buried in the archives of now-defunct sugar companies as well as in the recently released papers of deceased researchers and consultants who played key roles in the industry’s strategy. They show how Big Sugar used Big Tobacco-style tactics to ensure that government agencies would dismiss troubling health claims against their products. Compared to the tobacco companies, which knew for a fact that their wares were deadly and spent billions of dollars trying to cover up that reality, the sugar industry had a relatively easy task. With the jury still out on sugar’s health effects, producers simply needed to make sure that the uncertainty lingered. But the goal was the same: to safeguard sales by creating a body of evidence companies could deploy to counter any unfavorable research.

.

.

The top Australian seller on underground online drug marketplace Silk Road has gone rogue and made off with tens of thousands of dollars, while several other Australian sellers appear to be missing in action. The exodus comes after 32-year-old Paul Howard was sentenced to three-and-a-half years in jail this month by a Melbourne judge after being caught using Silk Road to import a “smorgasbord” of drugs such as cocaine, MDMA and amphetamine, which he then sold. Now Australian Silk Road user EnterTheMatrix, who received dozens of glowing reviews and more than 99 per cent positive feedback selling prescription medication, LSD, MDMA and other substances via express post, has disappeared, leaving behind scores of angry customers who have paid for but not received their items.

.

.

The drug found in the University of South Alabama student who was fatally shot by a police officer in October is a research drug similar, but stronger, than LSD. Officials announced Friday that 18-year-old Gil Collar had apparently taken a tiny amount of 25I-C-NBOMe, known as 25-I before attending the BayFest music festival on Oct. 6. Hours later, he was apparently immune to punches he received from a student whose car window he was trying to climb in. He was able to stand up after a police officer shot him.

.

.

“One time there was this big fight on the yard between the Border Brothers and Gangster Disciples, this was at FCI Manchester in Kentucky, and we were tripping our heads off,” he recalls. “That shit blew my mind. It was like a movie. I literally have flashbacks of that scene to this day. The most vivid image…was this big black dude getting his head busted open by a little Mexican with a pipe… That picture has stayed with me. And it sucked because we got locked down for that shit for three days and I was tripping in my cell the whole time, trying not to freak out.”

.

.

Gurdev Samra’s garden of opium poppies once offered him a euphoric cup of tea, but on Monday it made him the first man in Canada to be convicted of growing the illicit plant. Samra, 63, was handed a one year conditional sentence after pleading guilty to growing 1,200 opium poppy plants at his Calgary home, which was busted by police last July. The judge took a dim view of the poppy garden, despite the fact cultivation of the plants was for personal use in tea —something Samra has done since he was a child in India.

.

.

The flamboyant 65-year-old frontman admits he has shovelled at least $5-6 million dollars worth of marching powder up his nose. In an interview on 60 Minutes this Sunday night, reporter Liz Hayes tells Steve she’d heard around 20 million bucks worth of cocaine had seen the inside nostrils of the ‘Demon of Screamin’. “Realistically, 5 or 6,” says Tyler. “But it doesn’t matter. You also could say I snorted half of Peru, but it doesn’t matter.”

.

.

There’s growing privacy concern over flying robots, or “drones”. Organizations like the EFF and ACLU have been raising the alarm over increased government surveillance of US citizens. Legislators haven’t been quick to respond to concerns of government spying on citizens. But Texas legislators are apparently quite concerned that private citizens operating hobby drones might spot environmental violations by businesses. You may recall the story from 2012 in which a hobbyist operating a small UAV over public land in Dallas, TX accidentally photographed a Dallas meat-packing plant illegally dumping pig blood into the Trinity river, resulting in an EPA indictment. Representative Lance Gooden has introduced HB912 to solve this “problem”.

.

.

The documents provide more details about the surveillance capabilities of the department’s unmanned Predator B drones, which are primarily used to patrol the United States’ northern and southern borders but have been pressed into service on behalf of a growing number of law enforcement agencies including the FBI, the Secret Service, the Texas Rangers, and local police. Homeland Security’s specifications for its drones, built by San Diego-based General Atomics Aeronautical Systems, say they “shall be capable of identifying a standing human being at night as likely armed or not,” meaning carrying a shotgun or rifle. They also specify “signals interception” technology that can capture communications in the frequency ranges used by mobile phones, and “direction finding” technology that can identify the locations of mobile devices or two-way radios.

.

.

Also, you claim that it is environmentally friendly to ride a bike. But if I am not mistaken, a cyclists has an increased heart rate and respiration. That means that the act of riding a bike results in greater emissions of carbon dioxide from the rider. Since CO2 is deemed to be a greenhouse gas and a pollutant, bicyclists are actually polluting when they ride.

.

.

185,000 spyware emails were sent to Aaron’s computers – Technology on NBCNews.com

Spyware installed on computers leased from furniture renter Aaron’s Inc. secretly sent 185,000 emails containing sensitive information — including pictures of nude children and people having sex — back to the company’s corporate computers, according to court documents filed Wednesday in a class-action lawsuit.

.

.

“Premo charged the police like a linebacker, taking out a lieutenant and resisting arrest so forcefully that he fractured an officer’s bone. That’s the story prosecutors told in Premo’s trial, and it’s the general story his arresting officer testified to under oath as well,” Pinto writes. He adds that attorneys for the defendant underwent a lengthy search to try and find video that verified their own account yjpihj, and found one in the hands of Democracy Now. “Far from showing Premo tackling a police officer,” writes Pinto, that video “shows cops tackling him as he attempted to get back on his feet.” The footage obtained from Democracy Now also showed that an NYPD officer was filming the arrest as well, but prosecutors told Premo’s attorney that no such footage existed.

.

.

Yes, Lil Poopy (real name, Luis Rivera Jnr) would agree. He’s a child-rapper, you see, and as he explains in his new song, a cover of French Montana’s Pop That: “Coke ain’t a bad word, it’s only soda.” I take his point. But should a nine-year-old even have an opinion on such matters? No, basically. And now the Massachusetts Department of Children and Families are investigating his father, Luis Rivera Snr, to decide whether the boy’s music career constitutes child abuse. Because he makes one reference to the word “coke”? No. Because he makes numerous references, appears with an adult band called the Coke Boys who know him as “the Cocaine Cowboy”, calls himself “Boston Lou” in homage to legendary cocaine smuggler Boston George, and smacks an adult woman’s jiggling bottom suggestively at the end of the video.

.

.

But now the situation is getting even more insane than you could have imagined: the International Dairy Foods Association (IDFA) and the National Milk Producers Federation (NMPF) have filed a petition with the FDA asking the FDA to alter the definition of “milk” to secretly include chemical sweeteners such as aspartame and sucralose. Importantly, none of these additives need to be listed on the label. They will simply be swept under the definition of “milk,” so that when a company lists “milk” on the label, it automatically includes aspartame or sucralose. And if you’re trying to avoid aspartame, you’ll have no way of doing so because it won’t be listed on the label. This isn’t only for milk, either: It’s also for yogurt, cream, sour cream, eggnog, whipping cream and a total of 17 products, all of which are listed in the petition at FDA.gov.

.

.

An Indonesian woman drowned her nine-year-old son in the bath, claiming she was worried that his “small penis” would affect his prospects for the future, a police spokesman said Thursday. The 38-year-old woman from the capital Jakarta told police her son had had a small penis prior to being circumcised, but that it appeared to shrink further after the operation, police spokesman Rikwanto, who goes by one name, told AFP. “She told police investigators that she killed him as he would have a bleak future with his small penis,” Rikwanto said. “She drowned her son in a bathtub filled with water. She then dressed him and laid him on a bed. After that, she went to a nearby police office to report her crime.”

.

.

The heavily-customized denim jacket worn by Marko (Alex Winter) in the 1987 horror classic The Lost Boys. The Lost Boys is the story of teenage vampires and vampire hunters set in California. In the film, Marko wears this denim jacket that has been highly customized with a plethora of patches of accessories, such as rubber fishing lures.

.

.

“A Canadian couple walked by and said: ‘We’ve just seen that bird take something out of your campervan’,” Mr Leach laughed. Advertisement “It took all the money I had. I was left with $40 in my pocket.” The unsuspecting tourist had stashed his travel cash – about $NZ1300 (about $A1100) – in a small cloth drawstring bag and left it on the dashboard, where the bird apparently found it while rummaging through other items. The kea grabbed the bag and made a clean aerial getaway.

.

.

Just in time to send to your Valentine sweetheart, a huge selection of the offbeat, odd, perplexing, inappropriate, outlandish, bizarre, sexist, eccentric and far-out funny cards, all collected in one place …for YOU (with love)!

.

.

Whip-its!

.

.

USDA School Lunch Reform Rules are a Complete Hoax: Here’s the Proof :

The US government is in bed with junk food manufacturers The US government has no intention of hurting the profits of its most powerful supporters: food and drug corporations. Forcing school lunches to become healthier means reduced profits for the processed food giants that supply all the genetically modified, chemically preserved, refined, processed, nutrient-deprived crap that our children are raised on. The goal of the USDA — the same department that has completely sold out to Monsanto, for the record — is to make it appear like they are doing something to improve the health of children while, in actuality, doing nothing to restrict the profit growth of junk food companies. Remember: We’ve seen this same hoax before, back in 2006 with Bill Clinton. That too was praised as something of a “treaty” with junk food companies and soda manufacturers. But as I said back then, it was all a publicity stunt designed to delay any legislation. And it worked! No laws were passed and the …

.

.

U.S. officials are asking for more of what we’re doing from more of our daily Internet activities — and more often than not, they’re doing so without getting a court’s permission. The privacy act is part of that, and so is a growing database of government eyes. Google, however, is hoping to change that. The search giant has increased its lobbying efforts to get the outdated privacy changed, reports Bloomberg’s Eric Engleman. In 2012, Google spent $16.5 million on lobbying, up from $9.7 million the year before. This year, the Senate will vote on an updated version of the ECPA that requires a warrant for all email and private communication stored over the cloud. Google is in talks with other advocacy groups to creating a coalition to get those reforms passed, a Google spokesman told Bloomberg.

.

.

As reported by Wuhan’s Evening Newspaper, at the “2012 Chutian Automobile Festival” held on November 16th at the Wuhan International Conference & Exhibition Center, several little girls in bikinis posing like car models, attracting crowds of onlookers. Photos of these little girls in bikinis were posted on Weibo, inciting strong reactions, with comments nearly “all one-sided” against the organizer of the auto show, the automobile manufacturers, and the parents of these little girls. One visitor to the car exhibition who saw the “show” commented that having little children wearing bikinis as car models is businesses harming “the buds of our motherland” and that the parents were being absolutely irresponsible.

Google searches involving black-sounding names are more likely to serves up ads suggestive of a criminal record than white-sounding names, says computer scientist

.

.

January 5 afternoon, at the Hangzhou Zoo lion exhibit, as soon as a group of visitors spotted the African Lions, they began to make snowballs. The lions felt something was amiss. The lioness swiftly hid under a wooden plank, and the male lion used a tree trunk as cover, with both eyes fixed on the visitors. “WHOOSH”, a young person threw a snowball at the African lions. The lions immediately dodged it, the snowball missing, but the visitor laughed loudly all the same. Some other visitors and children began to follow suit, throwing snowballs at the lions. One of them used large chunks of snow and threw them down with all of his strength. The lioness was freaked out, made a wide circle around, and hid together with the male lion tightly in a corner. In the end, just as those visitors left “in content”, the male lion gave out a fierce roar, his eyes fixed hard on their backs as they left. Walking around the zoo, people were seen attacking animals with snowballs at the alpaca Barn, monk…

.

.

Obama only wants military leaders who will shoot US citizens

On Monday, renowned author and humanitarian Dr. Jim Garrow made a shocking claim about what we can expect to see in Obama’s second term. Garrow made the following Facebook post: I have just been informed by a former senior military leader that Obama is using a new “litmus test” in determining who will stay and who must go in his military leaders. Get ready to explode folks. “The new litmus test of leadership in the military is if they will fire on US citizens or not.” Those who will not are being removed. Garrow replied: “The man who told me this is one of America’s foremost military heroes.” Understand, this is not coming from Alex Jones or Jesse Ventura, or from anyone else the left often dismisses with great ease.

.

.

Football as a homoerotic ritual — are players really gay?

The object of the game, simply stated, is to get into the opponent’s end zone while preventing the opponent from getting into one’s own end zone. … We can now better understand the appropriateness of the “bottom patting” so often observed among football players. A good offensive or defensive play deserves a pat on the rear end. The recipient has held up his end and has thereby helped protect the collective “end” of the entire team. One pats one’s teammates’ ends, but one seeks to violate the end zone of one’s opponents! … Certainly the terminology used in football is suggestive. One gains yardage,but it is not territory which is kept in the sense of being permanently acquired by the invading team.The territory invaded remains nominally under the proprietorship of the opponent. A sports announcer or fan might say, for example, “This is the deepest penetration into (opponent’s team name) territory so far.” The trust one has for one’s own teammates is perhaps signalled …

.

.

It’s funny but not-so-funny when you consider that what America has to offer is, in fact, a mirage. What the ad people realize I’m sure is that, after more than a decade in Iraq and Afghanistan, the idea of “quenching” — no matter how much you “put down” the Arabs and Islamists — couldn’t be more ironic.

.

.

Hickeys all over naked guy: Hardcore! Female college students leave hundreds of hickeys on naked guy He is almost completely naked, with some tree roots tied to his hair hanging down to his ankles, both hands bound to a wooden pile stretched open, standing in a cross, with roasted chickens hanging off both ends of the wooden pole and his private parts; She silently leaves hundreds of hickeys on his chest, abdomen, and arms. He says this is performance art, to criticize today’s attitudes towards love that seek only pleasure without taking responsibility.

.

.

A secret legal review of the even more secret “rules” of the US cyberwarfare capabilities has concluded that President Obama has virtually limitless power to start cyber wars in the name of “pre-emption” of potential attacks coming out of another nation. The reports come from officials involved in the review, and are impossible to verify since the rules themselves are classified, and the review is being conducted entirely in secret. The current rules, to the extent anyone understands them, say that the Pentagon can openly attack targets in nations during wartime, but that doesn’t explain things like Stuxnet, the US-made computer worm that attacked Iran and subsequently much of the planet, doing massive damage to industry when it escaped Iranian computers and went worldwide.

.

.

GRAFFITI FICTION is an archive about graffiti in fictionnal movies and series. We starded years ago to gather filmstills from movies we liked where graffiti appear. We focus on graffiti which are created especially for the movie and which have a narrative function in the story – as a point or as an reminder of it.

.

.

But it is important to remember that while they are talking about disarming you and me, they are not talking about disarming themselves. They will still be coddled in their fortresses. The closer you get to the Capitol, the more armed guards there are. Up close, there are bombproof guard shacks, literally, on every street corner. Squads of machine-gun carrying guards dot the magnificent marble buildingscape at all times. Leaders in Congress ride around with escorts of huge armed men. Is that because what they do every day is more dangerous than what you and I do every day? Is that because their safety is more important than our safety? Or is it because they have figured out a way for suckers like you and me to pay for their security and so they don’t much care anymore about ours?

.

.

Joshua sometimes does his homework at a McDonald’s restaurant—not because he is drawn by the burgers, but because the fast-food chain is one of the few places in this southern Alabama city of 4,000 where he can get online access free once the public library closes.

.

.

In response to the growing concern over China’s air pollution, a theatrical Chinese entrepreneur is selling cans of fresh air. Chen Guangbiao, a multimillionaire, philanthropist and environmentalist, is selling each can for 5 yuan (80 cents) according to the Brisbane Times. Chen isn’t trying to make profit off the stunt; his estimated net worth is $740 million. There are different air varieties including: pristine Tibet, post-industrial Taiwan, and Yan’an (early era of Communism). The air is collected and compressed from “revolutionary regions” from Jinggang Mountain in Jiangxi Province to some ethnic minority areas and Taiwan, according to China’s Global Times.

.

.

Police seized a big package of pot earlier this week after the weed took a wrong turn on a cross-country trip and landed in the stock room at a north Seattle Kmart. Just after noon on January 28th, Kmart employees called police to their store at 132nd and Aurora Avenue N. after a package—filled with 10 pounds of weed wrapped in garbage bags, packing peanuts, and cleaning-fluid-soaked pages from a Korean newspaper (?!?)—arrived at the store. Delivery information on the package indicates it was originally shipped via UPS from Los Angeles to a Philadelphia address, but never made it to its intended destination in Philly.

.

.

For one week, they captured stunning photographs of the rare sight, which is the first discovery of its kind for sperm whales. The squid-hunting creatures are not known for their gregariousness. “Sperm whales have never been observed to interact with another species in a non-agonistic way; basically, that means in a friendly way,” said Wilson when reached by phone at his office in Berlin. “Dolphins, on the other hand, are the exact opposite. They are extremely gregarious. They’re very, very social.” The researchers were so surprised that at first they weren’t sure what they were witnessing. However, they noticed enough physical gestures initiated by both species to determine it was a social interaction. “The touching of flutes and nuzzling with the rostrum, these are all extremely friendly, social gestures for cetaceans to do to one another,” he said.

.

.

Gorilla in Prague Zoo hangs himself

The zoo said in a statement that 5-year-old Tatu was found hanging with a rope around his neck Friday morning in a sleeping room. Spokesman Michal Stastny said all attempts to revive Tatu failed. He said there were no cameras in the room and it is not clear exactly what happened. Mammals curator Pavel Brandl said Tatu likely unbraided one of the dozens ropes the gorillas use in their pavilion for climbing and put a strand around his neck before hanging himself.

.

.

Angelina Spencer, the executive director of the Association of Club Executives, which serves as a trade association for strip clubs, said an informal survey of convention business in New York and Denver had determined that Republicans dropped more money at clubs, by far. “Hands down, it was Republicans,” she said. “The average was $150 for Republicans and $50 for Democrats.”

.

.

Cult activity is suspected after a woman’s body was stolen from a southern New Jersey mausoleum. Pleasantville police said someone broke into the mausoleum, which has six gravesites, on Thursday night or Friday morning and stole the body of Pauline Spinelli, who had died in 1996 at the age of 98, according to the Associated Press. Police also said the body might have been taken for use in some sort of ritual.

.

.

The United States today has a vast intelligence apparatus, on the ground, in the sky and even in space. Technically it puts the old Soviet Union to shame, and sucks up millions of terabytes of data daily. But, that doesn’t mean that what is reported is understood. The analysts seek to make sense of it but the policy makers are often so locked into templates of action and pre-formulated strategies that insure the input doesn’t lead to course corrections or changes in direction. They operate with a kind of intellectual “locked-in” disease that freezes out new ideas. The system is manned by ideologists and choked with ideology, constantly leading to so-called intelligence ‘failures’ that fill many library shelves. Yet even when post mortems are filed, few in the commanding heights of our national security apparatus is willing to look back and draw lessons. They are too busy, lazy or just hacks (as opposed to hackers.)

.

.

Much has been made of government’s power to survey citizens using technologies such as packet capture and deep packet inspection. Even used in a limited fashion, these technologies can gather massive amounts of data on the online behaviors of individuals, and when taken together they can create an electronic profile of people’s lives. That potential—and concerns about its abuse—have driven privacy advocates to push for the repeal or alteration of laws such as the PATRIOT Act. At the same time, US law enforcement and intelligence agencies have struggled over the past decade to take all of this information and put it to use. The poor search capabilities of the FBI’s software, inadequate user training, and the fragmented nature of the organization’s intelligence databases all meant there was no way for anyone involved in the investigation to have a complete picture of what was going on with Hasan.

.

.

Matrix director Larry Wachowski is now a ‘she’, after undergoing a sex-change operation. For some time now, the film director has been answering to ‘Lana Wachowksi’, and says she has been “transitioning” from male to female for a number of years. At a Los Angeles movie promo last week, Wachowski showed up in a gray dress and fuchsia dreadlocks, announcing in a German accent: “Hi, I’m Lana.” It isn’t known whether the Matrix director’s public switching of genders is complete yet, but this was far from Wachowski’s first big public appearance as Lana: she was appearing in public as early as 2004, at events such as the San Diego Comic-Con.

.

.

At first glance, it could be a dramatic scene from a science-fiction movie. But this giant hole of fire in the heart of the Karakum Desert is not the aftermath of an attack on Earth, launched from outer space. It is a crater made by geologists more than 40 years ago, and the flames within have been burning ever since. Welcome to Derweze in Turkmenistan – or, as the locals have called it, ‘The Door to Hell’.

.

.

‘Women and children first’ is a myth, shipwreck study shows

The study, published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, was based on the premise that crew members and male passengers stood the greatest chance of survival in a free-for-all ship evacuation, owing to greater strength and knowledge of the vessel. If men chose to sacrifice themselves for the sake of women and children, however, their survival rates should suffer accordingly. They did not. In examining 18 shipping disasters dating to the 1850s, the economists found little evidence that men were inclined to surrender their survival advantage. Overall, the survival rate was 61% for crew members, 44% for captains, 37% for male passengers, 27% for women and 15% for children.

.

.

The opening ceremony of the Olympics was very symbolic. Although for those who lacked the eyes to see & understand it, it was a boring show compared to past opening ceremonies. This is typical of inducing & using the occult symbols within something like this. It’s there but it’s hidden. The baby that showed up in the stadium egg was the sun/son rebirth we’ve been talking about for weeks. All after the ‘exorcism’ of the scary nightmares from the minds and imagination of the children…orphans being tended to by nurses and such…symbolic of the human species being abandoned by their ‘gods’ in the myths and stories of our ancient origins.

.

.

Daley and partner Pete Waterfield slipped into fourth place after an error on their fourth of six attempts spoiled an otherwise consistent performance. Soon afterward, Daley reposted a message from a Twitter user called Rileyy69 that read: “You let your Dad down, I hope you know that.” [ Related: American athletes defy IOC ban on social media use to promote sponsors ] Daley added his own message to the retweet, saying: “After giving my all, you get idiot’s (sic) sending me this.” Daley has more than 780,000 followers and following his response, his Twitter tormentor was bombarded with messages from angry fans. Yahoo! Sports understands he then threatened one of the respondents, while claiming he would “drown” Daley. He later tried to backtrack by sending an apology. Police were already preparing to get involved by that point, though, as part of an ongoing crackdown by British law enforcement on social media abuse, particularly that directed toward high profile figures.

.

.

The end of the world is nigh. Or so you might think if you immersed yourself in American popular culture. From TV adverts to Hollywood movies, depictions of post-apocalyptic worlds are everywhere. There is a long tradition of such apocalyptic thinking in the US. But as Matthew Barrett Gross and Mel Giles argue in their book The Last Myth, it has now moved beyond religious prophecies into the secular world. The authors also claim that activists from both the political left and right have embraced apocalypse thinking, issuing dramatic warnings that everything from the traditional American way of life to the very existence of the planet is under threat. Barrett Gross spoke to the BBC in Utah to explain why he believes the rise of apocalyptic thinking prevents some people from trying to reach more pragmatic solutions to 21st Century problems.

.

.

The pills, made by Proteus Digital Health, have sand-particle-sized silicon chips with small amounts of magnesium and copper on them. After they’re swallowed, they generate voltage as they make contact with digestive juices. That signals a patch on the person’s skin, which then relays a message to a mobile phone given to a healthcare provider. It’s only been approved for use with placebos right now, but the company is hoping to get it approved for use with other drugs (which would be where it would get the most use).

.

.

Is the Sky Blue?

A recent episode of Radiolab centered on questions about colors. It profiled a British man who, in the 1800s, noticed that neither The Odyssey nor The Iliad included any references to the color blue. In fact, it turns out that, as languages evolve words for color, blue is always last. Red is always first. This is the case in every language ever studied. Scholars theorize that this is because red is very common in nature, but blue is extremely rare. The flowers we think of as blue, for example, are usually more violet than blue; very few foods are blue. Most of the blue we see today is part of artificial colors produced by humans through manufacturing processes. So, blue is the last color to be noticed and named. An exception to the rarity of blue in nature, of course — one that might undermine this theory — is the sky. The sky is blue, right?

.

.

It’s a virus that originated in birds, but the newest strain of avian flu has killed 162 harbor seals in New England and scientists warn it could be even more dangerous if it jumps to humans. Researchers revealed on Tuesday that the aquatic mammals, which washed up dead or dying on the shores of Maine and northern Massachusetts last fall, were infected with the H3N8 strain of influenza. The seals suffered horrifying skin lesions, a previously unknown symptom in flu deaths, and pneumonia as a result of a virus that they contracted from North American waterfowl, according to researchers at Columbia University. Even more worrying is the fact that the virus has mutated to develop the ability to infect the cells of mammals — a first for the avian pathogen.

.

.

Thomas Pugh and colleagues explain that concentrations of nitrogen dioxide (NO2) and microscopic particulate matter (PM) — both of which can be harmful to human health — exceed safe levels on the streets of many cities. Past research suggested that trees and other green plants can improve urban air quality by removing those pollutants from the air. However, the improvement seemed to be small, a reduction of less than 5 percent. The new study sought a better understanding of the effects of green plants in the sometimes stagnant air of city streets, which the authors term “urban street canyons.” The study concluded that judicious placement of grass, climbing ivy and other plants in urban canyons can reduce the concentration at street level of NO2 by as much as 40 percent and PM by 60 percent, much more than previously believed. The authors even suggest building plant-covered “green billboards” in these urban canyons to increase the amount of foliage.

.

.

Rochester, NY Police officers Rob Osipovitch and Ryan Hartley, falsely accused Mr. Barideaux of failing to come to a complete stop in order to have a reason to pull him over. But thanks to the power of video, Osipovitch and Hartley never stopped to think that City of Rochester traffic cameras were recording the whole incident. And that the video recorded their lie. After the illegal stop and search of Mr. Barideaux’s vehicle, the Rochester Police Department claims that the officers found drugs and a weapon. After spending four months in jail, Monroe County Court Judge Daniel Doyle dismissed all charges against Barideaux. In his decision to dismiss the charges, Judge Doyle said “it was an unreasonable stop… based on the review of the video, there’s no ambiguity at all that a car being operated by Jeramie Barideaux did come to a complete stop before the police stopped the vehicle.”

.

.

The face is pretty unmistakable: The features look strikingly similar to the now iconic visage that’s been burned into our collective consciousness over the past ten days. But this face doesn’t belong to the person alleged to have shot seventy people at an Aurora movie theater just after midnight on July 20. This one belongs to a promising San Diego-based singer/songwriter named Chris Holmes, who just happens to share a surname — and a gene pool — with a suspected mass murderer: James Holmes, who’ll be back in Arapahoe County District Court this morning.

.

.

On average, according to the organization, a multiple-victim shooting happens every 5.9 days in the United States. The deadliest city in this period, according to the data, is Chicago, with 17 shootings since 2005—totaling 72 people wounded and 30 deaths. Thirteen of those shootings were in a public place. New Orleans, Kansas City, and Philadelphia were tied for second bloodiest, with nine shootings in this seven-year period. Plus, James Warren on why the Colorado shooting is tragically unsurprising. Thanks Jasmine

.

.

“Facebook will become the poster child for the current social-media bubble,” warns economist Gary Shilling in his latest Forbes column, “just as Pets.com was for the dot-com bubble.” Yes, Wall Street is repeating the 2000 dot-com crash as today’s social-media bubble crashes and burns.

.

.

The decentralized nature of the Internet, and the fact that the global network is built from a thicket of independent public and private networks, is limiting efforts to protect against such attacks, said Alexander, because it doesn’t allow the NSA or law enforcement to easily track Internet activity. “We do not sit around our country and look in; we have no idea if Wall Street is about to be attacked,” said Alexander.

.

.

About two years ago, bath salts — a lab-brewed drug that unpredictably mimics a freakish combination of coke, meth, and Ecstasy — suddenly popped into public consciousness with a rat-tat-tat of reports from emergency rooms and law-enforcement officials that sounded like the stuff of a D.A.R.E. officer’s most florid nightmare. By most accounts, the drug — then legal — first surfaced in Louisiana in mid-2010, quickly moved through the South, and then spread out in all directions. It was, in fact, in Louisiana where one of the first Code Red warnings about bath salts emerged, when a user lost her arm and part of her shoulder after she shot herself up and sparked a flesh-eating bacteria.

The argument that machines speak was first made in the context of Internet search. In 2003, in a civil suit brought by a firm dissatisfied with the ranking of Google’s search results, Google asserted that its search results were constitutionally protected speech. (In an unpublished opinion, the court ruled in Google’s favor.) And this year, facing increasing federal scrutiny, Google commissioned Eugene Volokh, a law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, to draft a much broader and more elaborate version of the same argument. As Professor Volokh declares in his paper: “Google, Microsoft’s Bing, Yahoo! Search, and other search engines are speakers.”

Back in October, the New York Times made substantial changes to a report about Occupy Wall Street protesters marching over the Brooklyn Bridge. Version one opened with: “After allowing them onto the bridge, the police cut off and arrested dozens of demonstrators.” Version two, edited just 20 minutes later, opened: “In a tense showdown above the East River, the police arrested more than 700 demonstrators from the Occupy Wall Street protests who took to the roadway as they tried to cross the Brooklyn Bridge on Saturday afternoon.”

AMERICA’S DANGEROUS LOVE AFFAIR WITH COUNTERINSURGENCY At the beginning of this year one of the weirdest characters ever to become involved in the present Afghan war died. He was called Jack Idema and he was a brilliant con-man. For a moment, during the early part of the war, Idema persuaded all the major TV networks and scores of journalists that he was some kind of special forces super-hero who was using all kinds of “black ops” to track down and arrest the terrorists. In reality, before 2001, Idema had been running a hotel for pets in North Carolina called The Ultimate Pet Resort. He had been in prison for fraud, and had tried to con journalists before about being some kind of super-spy.

US Bank closed its branch in the UC Davis Memorial Union Building in March. The sit-down protests were a success. That such effective protest cannot be tolerated is evident from the response of the University administration and the Yolo County District Attorney. The charges against the Davis Dozen have a notable history of service: “Obstructing movement in a public place” was an indictment invented to criminalise homelessness in Alabama. The Davis Dozen are to learn – on behalf of everyone affected by austerity – that protest against the conditions which lead to homelessness is criminalised by the same legislation that makes homelessness illegal. For the bankers, millionaire University administrators and state functionaries for whom “revenue” is to be maximised no matter what the cost to the people they serve, this paradox is no paradox at all.

You are not a bastion of self-control. Everyone has a set amount of the stuff, and when life saps it, people can break. Now fMRIs from a University of Iowa study show exactly what it looks like when that happens. The anterior cingulate cortex usually sends up the red flag when a situation requires self-control. It goes at a steady rate as long as it needs to. But the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, which actually manages self-control, fires less and less the more it does its job. In other words, people know when they’re giving in, they just have a hard time doing anything about it after a while.

Last month, a “senior administration official” said the number of civilians killed in drone strikes in Pakistan under President Obama is in the “single digits.” But last year “U.S. officials” said drones in Pakistan killed about 30 civilians in just a yearlong stretch under Obama. Both claims can’t be true.

Most kids are taught that values such as hard work, persistence, and dedication will put them on a path to success. But that is reportedly not William Abreu’s philosophy. The assistant principal at Progress HS for Professional Careers in Bushwick allegedly told a female student hoping to secure a summer job that all you have to do, really, is suck some balls. Preferably his balls. “Would you suck my b—s for me? That’s the things [sic] you have to do to succeed,” he allegedly told one of the teenage girls. “You have to come to work looking sexy, so I can see how pretty you are.” According to an investigation, Abreu did not limit his career advice to just one girl, because he cares about everyone’s future: The report by the Special Commissioner of Investigation says Abreu asked a second girl about her bedroom habits with her boyfriend, and suggested she could stay a virgin by having only anal sex.

The Internet will become a religion, in part because everything will happen on it, including all other religions, but mostly because it will be the first platform for true otherness to appear on the planet. Not other as in other variety of human or other variety of animal, but other as in Other, an agent not like us yet bigger than us. A true alien being. Of which we are part.

A new Louisiana law requires sex offenders and child predators to state their criminal status on their Facebook or other social networking page, with the law’s author saying the bill is the first of its kind in the nation. Thanks Jasmine

Eagle-eyed viewers who saw the report on Sunday immediately identified the mystery mushroom as a double-headed masturbation toy with an artificial vagina on one side and an artificial anus on the other. Yes, you read that right, it was a jack-off aid that some guy used to spank his monkey when he wasn’t getting it from his wife.

Every year around this time, mysterious electric blue clouds appear over the North and South pole. They are called noctilucent clouds and they can only be seen in deep twilight, when the Sun is below the horizon. According to NASA, “their origin is still largely a mystery”: Various theories associate them with meteoric dust, rocket exhaust, global warming—or some mixture of the three. They are the highest clouds, located almost on the edge of space at 54 miles (85 kilometers) from the Earth’s surface, in the mesosphere. They are very difficult to observe, but they appear as white and blue tendrils when they are illuminated by the Sun and the rest of the atmosphere is in our planet’s shadow.

The number of earned PhD degrees in the United States is 40,000 to 45,000 each year. The number of fake PhDs bought each year from diploma mills exceeds 50,000. In other words, more than half of all people claiming a new PhD have a fake degree. • Fake medical degrees are an urgent problem. It is easy to buy a medical degree from a fake school, or a counterfeit diploma in the name of a real school. Twenty-five years ago, a Congressional committee calculated that there were over 5,000 fake doctors in the United States, and there are many more now. People have died because of these fakes. • The Government Accountability Office looked for fake degrees among employees of less than 5 percent of federal agencies and found enough to suggest that more than one hundred thousand federal employees have at least one, many of them paid for by taxpayers not to mention resulting higher pay and increased retirement benefits.

Prescription painkillers have topped car accidents as the leading cause of accidental death in the U.S., according to a new report. Research by the National Center for Health Statistics show that drug poisoning is now a more common way to go than being killed on the road. It follows recent celebrity deaths from painkillers, including Michael Jackson, Heath Ledger and Anna Nicole Smith.

Urinating on a jellyfish sting can make it worse, according to Jennifer Ping, an emergency medicine physician at Straub Clinic and Hospital in Honolulu, who has studied the most effective treatments for dealing with jellyfish stings. About 15 people per year check in to her hospital’s emergency room after being stung by jellyfish. Jellyfish stings are caused by contact with a jellyfish tentacle, which can trigger millions of stinging cells (nematocytes) to pierce the skin and inject venom, Ping says.

Among mammals, only a very few species live in seemingly monogamous arrangements, and fewer still maintain sexual fidelity within those relationships. Man certainly does not seem to be one of them. There is increasing evidence that many men are not biologically or psychologically disposed to sexual monogamy. When one considers the seeming universality of the expectation of monogamy in today’s world (or at least the world presented by Western media), it is perhaps surprising that monogamy has not always been the expected state for man. Despite the vehemence with which many Christians defend monogamy, many men in the Bible, including David and Solomon, were far from monogamous. In fact, whenever conservative marriage advocates espouse “traditional marriage,” I always have to laugh – even in Christianity, traditional marriage included polygyny (a marriage arrangement with one man and multiple wives), and was not explicitly limited to a monogamous arrangement between “one man and one woman”

As the consolidated corporate media machine fails in its function as the fourth estate, citizen journalists and independent press outlets are there to pick up the slack. But this important task is becoming increasingly threatened by the harsh treatment at the hands of the police force. Citizen based media is often targeted by police for reporting unfiltered truths, or they are lumped together with activists/protesters and beaten or arrested. As more and more Americans choose alternative news sources to find out what is really happening in their country, harassing those providing first hand reports muzzles the free flow of information and poses a threat to democracy.

In a startling new theory, scientists have predicted that the passage of time will stop altogether. The theory is based on research conducted at two Spanish Universities aimed at explaining why the expansion of the universe appears to be accelerating, a conundrum that has puzzled scientists for years. What they came up with was the notion that the expansion of the universe isn’t accelerating at all; instead time itself is slowing down at an imperceptible rate and that eventually it will stop entirely, resulting in a perpetual static snapshot for the rest of eternity.

A Florida teacher was arrested on child abuse charges after allegedly encouraging her students to cut and burn themselves in order to rid their bodies of evil spirits. Danielle Harkins, 35, allegedly brought seven teens to a spot by the pier in St. Petersburg on Saturday, and began the strange religious ritual by starting a small fire, police told WTSP News. The teacher then told the teens to cut themselves to cast out demons lurking in their bodies, and cauterize the wounds to prevent the spirits from returning, investigators said. “There was apparently some chanting and then dancing around this fire that was taking place,” St. Petersburg Police Department spokesman Mike Puetz told Fox Tampa Bay. Two kids were cut, and one sustained second-degree burns after the teacher allegedly poured perfume on his wound and lit it with a cigarette lighter, investigators told WTSP. One of them was cut in the neck with a broken bottle and the wound was cauterized with a heated-up house key

When she appeared in court on Monday, several local witches and warlocks showed up to support her — something her attorney noted to the judge. Salem has been a hotbed for Wiccans and other people who practice pagan religions because of the 1692 and 1693 which trials there, which saw Puritanical settlers execute 28 people suspected of practicing witchcraft. Griffin’s uncle, Christian Day, posted on Facebook asking a friend to ‘send him energy’ to help his niece. ‘I need to hex each and every person that would dare harm her,’ he wrote. ‘I call upon everything in the heavens and hells to both protect her and to strike down anyone who would capitalize on this tragedy for their own gain.’

Add to the list of things robots now do better than humans: feel. Researchers at the U. of Southern California’s Viterbi School of Engineering have designed a robot finger that can outperform humans in the basic yet complex sensory task of touching. Their robot finger, equipped with a novel tactile sensor technology, is better at identifying and distinguishing between different materials and textures than human beings are.

The last time the FCC updated its guidelines for radiation-exposure was in 1996. Some experts say the review is long overdue. The current standards are based on behavioral research conducted on animals in the 1980s. Henry Lai, a researcher and professor at the University of Washington, who has conducted studies on the biological effects of cell phone radiation, told CNET a year ago for an article published about the SAR standard that more than 60 studies in the last decade have shown biological changes to cells at SAR levels less than the current safety standard allowed by the FCC and the FDA.

This spring the Chronicle of Higher Education offered an in-depth look at the number of highly educated people receiving federal aid. Though, on average, they are still doing better than people without college degrees, these populations have not been immune to the recession.

According to a letter seen by TorrentFreak, Google are threatening action against one of the web’s largest YouTube conversion sites. The site, which according to Google’s own stats is pulling in 1.3 million visitors every day, extracts MP3 audio from YouTube videos and makes it available for users to download. Google’s lawyers say this must stop, and have given the site seven days to comply.

WhoSampled.com’s vast database has long been a source for music geeks to identify where their favorite samples came from, but now it’s coming to your smartphone too. Wired U.K. The WhoSampled iPhone app scans your music library and automatically shows you all the samples, covers and remixes associated with all of the artists and tracks in it. Plus, if you’re listening to a song and you want to access its data immediately, you can switch to the WhoSampled app from your music player and it’ll display all the musical connections for whatever’s playing.

Breast milk is starting to look like a potent HIV-fighter. An unknown component of breast milk appears to kill HIV particles and virus-infected cells, as well as blocking HIV transmission in mice with a human immune system.

The Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) said Tuesday that it expects to add 26 new synthetic drugs to its list of temporary Schedule I substances, an emergency authority that’s used to control little-known, poorly researched new substances that the agency feels pose a threat to public health. In the Food and Drug Administration Safety and Innovation Act, passed by the Senate in May and reconciled by the House last night, Congress agreed to expand the DEA’s authority to control such substances by fiat, expanding the time they can temporarily ban a new drug from 18 to 36 months. Congress also set up an explicit framework for identifying “similar chemical compounds” that produce the same or similar effects on humans as any other Schedule I substance.

Nine male students were suspended from Bell Middle School for allegedly masturbating while looking at pornography on their cell phones during English class. Students were suspended during the month of May, the district confirmed in an e-mail to NBC San Diego. But the email also states, the district is “prohibited from commenting on confidential student or personnel matters.” The teacher, Ed Johnson, is reportedly under fire because he did not respond to students who told him about the behavior while it was allegedly happening – only saying he would give students referrals if he caught them – then went on reading at his desk. Following the incident, there are reports of controversy from the faculty over how the situation was handled by the teacher. Students who knew about the suspensions told NBC San Diego that their behavior was “nasty” and “disgusting.”

An extraordinary condition that ballooned Wesley Warren Jr.’s scrotum to a massive 100 pounds made him feel like “a freak,” and the Las Vegas man set off on a campaign to raise $1 million for corrective surgery. But given the chance to have the surgery — even at no cost — the 47-year-old remains reluctant to go under the knife, the Las Vegas Review-Journal reported Monday. If anything, Warren’s new-found fame may have gone to his head, according to the newspaper, which said he appears to be enjoying his celebrity status. “I’ll make a decision when I’m ready,” Warren said.

The video hit the Internet on Wednesday. It shows a man walking up to the original 1929 Pablo Picasso masterpiece inside the Menil Collection in Montrose. He is then seen using a stencil to spray-paint the word “conquista,” which is Spanish for “couquer” on the painting before taking off. The man who took the video did not want to be identified. He said he confronted the man after he witnessed him spray-paint it and asked him why he did it. According to the witnesses, the vandal said he was an up-and-coming artist and he did it to honor Picasso’s work. “I just thought it was pretty cool how he just went up to the painting without fear, spray painted it and just walked off,” the witness told Local 2. Thanks Jasmine

RNCLatinos.com features as its main image a stock photo from Shutterstock, which tags the photo with keywords that clearly suggest the kids are Asian, including: “asia,” “asian,” “interracial,” “japanese,” and “thailand.” We’re guessing the RNC may have taken inspiration from Sharron Angle, who in 2010 told Hispanic children they looked Asian. When the RNC launched the site in October, the committee described it as a place where the “Republican National Committee can connect with Hispanic voters, and Hispanic voters can hear Hispanic Republican leaders.”